Hermann Bellinghausen: The Bird Blues
Hermann Bellinghausen
OR
a new twist As for music and its complicity with birdsong, it has just been provided by the Tsotsil composer and performer who presents himself as Zanate Blues. A musical surprise. In Jex/Blue Bird, one of the pieces on the album Sna mutetik/Bird's Nest (2025), the solo bird achieves the effect of Pink Floyd's sentimental bluesy dog, but more beautiful, after all, it is a bird and a myth. The melody itself, calm and meticulous, recalls David Gilmour's lyre, of course. Zanate Blues thus falls into the lineage of bird music, not as numerous as it might seem obvious, starring Olivier Messiaen, whose precursors included Vivaldi's Goldfinch (Il gardellino) ; Beethoven's Pastorale ; Rossini's The Thieving Magpie ; Saint-Saëns's Carnival of the Animals ; Respighi's Gli uccelli , or some Ravelian passages, but none with his depth and dedication.
Tseltal writer Delmar Penka doesn't hide his enthusiasm when commenting on his countryman's "Nido de pájaros" (Bird 's Nest) from the Chiapas Highlands, whom he considers "one of the greatest exponents of Tsotsil rock, of rock in Bats'i K'op in Chiapas and the world." For Penka , it is a masterpiece that makes the most minute heartbeats vibrate. There is no way not to be moved when listening to the songs that shine with their own light. Nature, myths, dreams, and beliefs come together in each musical piece, revealed through the song's songwriting, which is named after the song. The birds, which belong to the Tsotsil world, guide the aural rhythm; they mark the beat of the guitar, drums, bass, piano, and choirs. They fly over our ears and take us on a journey where the oneiric, the earthly, and the supernatural appear like a dream
.
It is worth noting that the Tsotsil rock mentioned by Penka has a broad and fruitful modern tradition, with a particular emphasis on a classic blues that has been transferred to metal, punk and hip hop, especially in San Juan Chamula and its spread to San Cristóbal de Las Casas, as well as Zinacantán, where the memorable fusion group Sak Tzevul and Zanate Blues themselves were born in 1996.
His work offers a catalogue of royal song and invests it with fine electroacoustic instrumentation, including choirs, full of melodic and rhythmic intuition in each song of the nest at hand: Chinchon/Sparrow, T'sunum/Hummingbird, Sempal/Mockingbird, Bak mut/Grackle, Jex/Bluebird, Kurkuvich'/Nightbird. The whistling, the scat, the open song of the forest birds are in no way inferior to Messiaen's exhaustive ornithological-musical catalogues, more faithful to birds than, say, Papageno, Papagena and the arias from The Magic Flute.
Messiaen's so-called oiseaux style produced at least Réveil des oiseaux (The Awakening of the Birds), Oiseaux exotiques (Exotic Birds), Le merle noir (The Blackbird), Petites esquisses d'oiseaux (Little Sketches of Birds), and the immense Catálogue d'Oiseaux (Catalogue of Birds), consisting of 77 bird tunes for piano in 13 notebooks, each with its solo
bird.
The grackle, that lively, intelligent, quarrelsome, and mischievous little crow common in the forests, parks, beaches, and fields of Mexico, unleashes the most rock-forward and intense track on Bird's Nest. Returning to Delmar Penka's enthusiasm, we find that it is, "without pretensions, a challenging album that was born to leave an important mark on the history of Tsotsil rock. Sna mutetik is an album that distinguishes the personality of its creator, fusing different instruments and musical genres derived from blues, jazz, progressive, and psychedelic rock. A fusion of sounds that are indissociable from the rhythms of nature."
In a performance for Exotic Birds with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Gustavo Dudamel recalls Paul Dukas telling the young Messiaen, “Listen to the birds! They are great teachers
.” This, the Venezuelan conductor notes, must have made a great impression on his teenage student. Even from childhood, Messiaen firmly believed that the tweeting language of aerial creatures was much more than mere communication. It was music. No other composer (indeed, no other ornithologist) dedicated himself so completely to the transcription, study, and musical application of birdsong
.
Now I remember that I once lived with a parrot, mistakenly named Pancha. We almost always got along badly. When she was feeling down or wanted to be annoying, she would emit the most annoying and frantic squeaks, and all I could do was lock her in the bathroom; damn Pancha. But when she was feeling good, she enjoyed son jarocho records of her original style (she came from the Sotavento region of Veracruz) and especially true blues, the black, bottleneck, and wolf howls. She kept the counter-tempo with metronome precision, fun and musical. Let's stay, then, blues-wise, with our heads in the air
, in the manner of the aphorist poet José Bergamín.
* To access Bird's Nest on YouTube you can start here :
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